Is the iPhone the new retail loyalty card?

As mobile phones continue to evolve into personal computers, more and more interaction with people will migrate onto these devices.

Just take the iPhone, using the browser on the phone is really easy, because you can zoom in to the relevant section. The vast majority of iPhone applications allow you to do a lot more in the way of interaction. There are apps like Opentable that allow you to find restaurants in your vicinity that have availability and then book tables, you can book railway tickets on it, you can look up stock prices and do trades from it and even scan barcodes and check online retail prices with RedLaser’s new app.

What is more the iPhone will soon loose its uniqueness. Google’s new Android phones will have similar capabilities. Nokia with their use of Symbian, Windows Mobile and other mobile operating systems will provide similar capabilities. So the volume of applications for mobile phones will increase.

It is clear that the trend set by Apple will grow into Tsunami.

Every person using a mobile phone will have a unique identifier, globally. If retailers could have access to that unique identifier, they have a universal platform for communicating with every person, through their phone.
It is very feasible today and I have seen demonstrations of a mobile phone becoming a loyalty card.

Imagine, when you buy a product at a retailer, they scan the phone Id, and that purchase is attributed to you. The retailer can send you your loyalty points based on your purchases to your phone. You can then redeem those points in-store or online.

The retailers could do a lot more. They can send you your receipts, individual communications, promotional vouchers, new product information all directly to your phone.

What I really like, is that the phone will allow you to communicate to the retailers anonymously until such time as you want to reveal your full identity. So it is the ideal mechanism for permission-based marketing.

So do you believe the mobile will become a new loyalty card? Let us know what you think?